It isnāt uniquely sacred or harmful. Itās just a part of life.
Imagine a world where we looked at having sex the same way we do going out dancing or grabbing dinner.
Some people really enjoy visiting dance clubs or restaurants, include their partners in these activities, and make them a cornerstone of their social calendar; other folks are quite indifferent, and can take or leave them. Some people might only like engaging in these activities when they are completely alone, andĀ others among us have highly specific preferences for the ways we might participate in them, if at all.
We donāt tend to assume a personās life is incomplete if they have never been to a rave, and if a new buddy recommends we take an invigorating walk instead of grabbing an order of tibs and injera, we probably donāt bat an eye. If a romantic partner doesnāt share our passion for darkwave it might cause us problems, but we could just as easily call up a buddy with aĀ Boy HarsherĀ shirt and still have a good time.
Most of us recognize thereās potential for trauma surrounding body movement and food, but we donāt consider a person fundamentally broken if their parents forced them to eat vegetables or take a ballet class. Weāll consider it wrong that their feelings werenāt respected, and understand if they never want to join us forĀ Black SwanĀ and cheese fondue.
We donāt clutch our pearls if a child finds out that people twerk or drink wine. Even when forms of these activities are firmly for adults-only, itās evident to all of us that they can be openly discussed, that no one is harmed by acknowledging their existence. These parts of regular life are not seen as magical, or assumed to be always beneficial or always negative for a person. Sometimes you eat an incredible burger. Sometimes you trip over your feet and briefly look like an ass. Neither defines your life or brings you to ruin.
And in the bold,Ā sex neutralĀ world that I am proposing, weād have much the same attitudes toward intimacy. If we could view sex neutrally, we wouldnāt necessarily consider it a deal-breaker if a romantic partner enjoyed floggings and we preferred Tantric massage. A person who eschewed all sex or only had sex alone would be a bit of a private type, not a fundamentally different or lacking type of being. If a person was forty-five years old when they made their sexual debut, weād treat them like someone who found a new hobby later in life, not like they were carrying some major social defect.
When sex was used as a tool of abuse or exploitation, weād focus a lot more on the facts of theĀ mistreatment, rather than the lurid details of the sex. We wouldnāt treat sex as radioactive, imbuing all it ever touched with a kind of sinister energy. And because we wouldnāt have to push back against such aĀ demonizedĀ view of sex, we wouldnāt have to claim that sex was some life-changing, sacred activity that possessed a special ability to cement marriages or alter bodies, either.
Sex would just be a blasĆ©Ā thing, like going to the grocery store, getting a foot massage, taking a shit, or rolling a joint: highly pleasurable to some, completely squicky and uncomfortable to others, varying in its importance over the course of our lifespan, and never fundamentally goodĀ norĀ evil, just a regular part of human life.
We could think dispassionately about sex if this were the case, not viewing gay men in puppy hoodsĀ as predators simply for existing in the open air, or penalizing librarians for giving kidsĀ resources about their own bodies. We could acknowledge, without flipping out, thatĀ fetuses masturbateĀ in the womb, children sometimes tie their dolls up in proto-fetishistic ways, and teenagers have sex with one another.
We would not consider it pathological if a young person had no interest in any of this, or if any person enjoyed sex in āunusualā waysāāātheyād be no more strange to us than a lover of peanut butter and pickle sandwiches.
And if a child were sexually exploited, or an adult person coerced into sexual activity,Ā sex neutrality would allow us to look to theĀ powerĀ andĀ accessĀ that made such an awful violation possible. Weād see the problem was that a child had no one but their parent to rely upon, and nowhere else to go when that parent blocked them from seeing friends, restricted their access to food,Ā orĀ used them for personal gratification. Rather than being blinded by our aversion to sex, weād be able to name all three controlling behaviors asĀ equallyĀ wrong, all potentially fraught and traumatic.
I wrote all about sex neutrality and how it helps us to better understand issues of consent, abuse, and desire. You can read it for free (or have it narrated to you by the Substack app) at drdevonprice.substack.com
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